Pet subjects: how can we find a missing snake in the house?

Our resident pet subjects answers your queries. This week: enticing a missing
snake from its hiding place and myths about tortoiseshell cats.

Heat seekers: snakes often hide in warm places in the house, such as boiler roomsPhoto: Alamy

By Peter Wedderburn

10:17AM BST 19 Apr 2013

Our five-year-old Yorkie cross has recently become terrified of hearing any form of music/singing on television. He whines and hides under the settee. This makes our viewing difficult. Our vet suggested we try pheromones to calm him, but this does not explain the reason for his behaviour. Can you help?

WH by email

It’s often difficult or impossible to work out why animals perform certain behaviours. Dogs cannot talk to us to explain themselves, so the best we can do is to make educated guesses. It’s likely that some performer on television may have made a sound which upset your dog; perhaps it was a particular note that grated or a type of sound that disagreed with him (the equivalent of nails being dragged down a blackboard).

This incident would have caused the first whining/hiding episode, and since then, the behaviour has become a learnt/habitual response. Owners often accidentally encourage this type of behaviour by giving their pet attention when they do it. Your vet is right that pheromones may help to calm your dog, but it won’t be easy to break the habit of this repetitive behaviour.

In the short-term, putting him out of the room while you are watching television seems like the obvious answer.

Prasad, my 14-year-old tom cat, started sneezing around 20 times a day. Our vet did not know why this was happening, but gave him an antibiotic injection. The sneezing ceased, only to return two weeks later. Another injection cured him for a short while, but now it has returned again. What could be causing this?

BW, Berkshire

Sneezing is caused by an irritation to the lining of the nose, and there are many possible causes. If it was a simple bacterial infection, the antibiotics would be likely to have cured it permanently, so an alternative explanation needs to be found. Check your home for any possible source of irritation (I heard about one sneezing cat that was cured after his owner removed a Peace Lily from his sleeping area).

Other causes of sneezing include viral infections, foreign bodies (such as a blade of grass lodged in the nasal passages) and tumours. Further investigations by your vet, including X-rays and inspecting the inside of the nasal cavity with an endoscope, may be needed to find the answer.

My grandson’s corn snake escaped from its vivarium a month ago. We have looked high and low, leaving dead mice out near its home – but to no avail. The house is big, with underfloor heating and lots of potential hiding places. What are the chances of it surviving and for how long? Can you suggest anything else that might tempt it out?

HD by email

I have heard of snakes reappearing more than a year after they have escaped, so there’s no need to panic: they can survive for months without food. Snakes can wriggle through tiny gaps into even tinier spaces, so you need to search every hiding place imaginable. They are attracted to warmth, so double-check all the obvious hot spots in the house (radiators, boiler rooms, computers).

You can also use heat to trap him: turn the heating up in one room, and put a human heat pad or electric blanket out on the floor, checking it regularly. Set up his vivarium in the same room, with its door open, some food inside, and its heating on too. Turn off the underfloor heating so that the rest of the house is colder, making him more likely to seek out your heated area. Don’t give up – he is most likely still to be somewhere in the house rather than braving the cold outdoors.

Is it true that a tortoiseshell cat needs to be the only cat in a household? In 60 years of being a cat fanatic, I have never encountered this idea, but I have recently moved to an area where the local cat protection people say this in every advert for a tortie wanting a home.

I fear that this allegation is depriving many lovely cats of a good home.

JC, Somerset

This is an old myth: there is even a word for tortoiseshell cats’ attitude – “tortitude” – which is said to describe their characteristics of feistiness and individuality. It’s a charming idea but it’s nonsense: there is no evidence that any personality trait in cats is linked to coat colour.

Other than their coat colouring, tortoiseshell cats are just like other domesticated cats. Tortoiseshell cats are just as likely (or unlikely) as other types of cats to get on with other cats in a household. Most adult cats tend to be sniffy about making new friends, and are probably happier in households on their own, but there is nothing special about a black, orange and white cat that makes it more likely to be solitary.

National Cat Watch Day is on May 6

A survey by Your Cat magazine has identified the three top reasons why cats are often disliked by neighbours: toileting in flower beds (64 per cent), hunting birds (48 per cent) and digging up and/or damaging plants (44 per cent). The magazine is running a Neighbourhood Cat Campaign to help raise awareness of the issues linked to cats being allowed access to the great outdoors, and to find ways of easing the tensions between cat-lovers and cat-haters.

Planned events include National Cat Watch Day on Monday May 6, aimed at finding out how cats spend their time in the garden. To find out more, visit yourcat.co.uk.

Rescue pet of the week

This week’s rescue pet is Monique, a two-year-old cat.

The carers who have been looking after Monique say: “Monique may be perched up high on her shelf when you first see her, but one little stroke and she is down, winding around your legs and purring. She is a very sweet-natured girl and will make a lovely pet in a calm household with people who can help her overcome her initial anxieties.”